For more than 50 years, Jerry Woodfill has been
employed by NASA in Houston.
He holds BAEE and BSEE degrees from Rice University which he attended on a basketball scholarship.
At the onset of the lunar
landing program, he managed the spacecraft warning systems so that he was
monitoring spacecraft Eagle's descent when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon.
Likewise, on April 13, 1970,
Jerry was monitoring Apollo 13's warning system
when the vehicle exploded. His system was the first alert of the
life-threatening malfunction depicted in the Tom Hanks-Ron Howard movie APOLLO
13. For his role in the rescue
of Apollo 13, he shared the Presidential Medal
of Freedom as a member of the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team.

For the 40th Anniversary of the rescue of Apollo 13,
the website Universe Today featured
"13 Things that Saved Apollo 13" based on
Jerry's recollection of mission events which contributed to the rescue.

Jerry often speaks to educational groups: schools,
teacher workshops, and summer space camps
as an outreach for the JSC education
volunteer program. To this end, he was recognized in 2004
as a “Hi-Lighted”
JSC Educational Volunteer and in 2012 as the NASA Johnson Space Center's Educational
Volunteer of the year. Having keynoted a number of national conventions
and the opening of a University Science and Mathematics Education School, he often shares historic talks
concerning the space race and the rescue of Apollo 13
from his perspective as a participant. Especially
well received is his
recreation of President John Kennedy’s Rice Stadium Moon Race Speech. Present
as a student, Jerry was inspired to the extent that it led to his employment at
the Manned Spacecraft Center in
1965.